CRITIC REVIEWS

With a work of such stark emotional beauty, Blake has picked up the torch once again with Overgrown. In the end, you judge a musical journey by your own emotional response, and mine was blown wide open.

Overgrown is a triumph. It is evidence of James Blake forging his own singular musical path, free from hype and expectation, and blossoming into both a producer of real compositional skill and a songwriter of great depth.

Though the stormy textures and somber reflections are pretty specific to a particular mood, Overgrown finds and fits that mood perfectly. While it might take listeners a few spins to find the right head space for the album, once they get there, it's an easy place to get lost in.

With only drums, bass and a sprinkle of reverb propping up his voice, Blake puts himself out there as he hasn't previously. The result is bone-chillingly gorgeous, right down to the feverish burst of pop strings that accompanies the final choruses.

‘Overgrown’ remains closer knit, and paradoxically less fragmented than its illustrious predecessor, ideas rotating core values guided by an affirmatively unseen hand. Which ultimately makes this an even better record.

While James Blake felt aloof, even ahuman, Overgrown is packed with feeling, and releases it with the smallest of gestures. While its title suggests excess, this is a nuanced move towards accessibility.

For all the newfound confidence and scope of these songs, they are still best viewed as dub versions of themselves: inversions of pop forms trading in negative space and decay, implication rather than exposition.

Overgrown is not as wall-to-wall great as his debut, but fans of the first LP will still find much to admire. The most promising development is his indulged fondness for various permutations of R&B and gospel styles

While Blake hasn't attempted anything startlingly new on Overgrown, he's certainly still the master of his own musical vocabulary—effortlessly compounding dark and nebulous electronic production with a soul, gospel, and R&B aesthetic.

Overgrown's biggest fault is lack of quality control; it's an uneven listen, with peaks like "Retrograde" segueing into the quotidian piano recital of "DLM," with an undistinguished back half that doesn't linger in the mind afterward.

He sings in a pretty, dusky warble, but often doesn't enunciate his lyrics; he's less a songwriter than a conjurer of melodies. But at its finest, Blake's mood music has some magic in it. It holds you in its spell.

At it best moments, Overgrown proves that the two sides of James Blake—the dancefloor oddball and the crossover songwriter—can exist side by side, but it also demonstrates that, at least right now, the balance between the two is totally off.

While his musicianship has grown in leaps, he plays too heavily into the pop tropes he teetered on in his previous work. Which while gave him a broader audience, didn't do much for his path as an artist.

It may not be as experimental as his debut, but it's not very hard to overlook that little flaw with beautiful, minimalist production, James Blake's great vocals and improved songwriting. Plus, RZA makes a great feature!

Everything Bon Iver strived to be on "22, A Million". Raw heartbreaking emotion over instrumentation that takes you into a realm perfectly crafted to fit the hums of the artist. Words aren't always needed, and they sometimes can clutter the true feeling of a record. James does a perfect job in displaying this on wax.